Wikipedia talk:Redirect#Edit warring

At Wikipedia_talk:Deletion_policy#Propose_addition_of_the_following_best_practice_to_redirection_section concerning recommending the use of {{tl|Uw-blar}} _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 02:18, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

There is an RfC on the proper venue for BLARed articles at {{slink|Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)|RfC: Amending ATD-R}}. voorts (talk/contributions) 00:23, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

Tech News notes that :phab:T326056 has been resolved and will be implemented this week (presumably Thursday). This means that from then you should get an error message when trying to create a double redirect, recommending you change the target to that of the second redirect. Thryduulf (talk) 02:46, 28 January 2025 (UTC)

:{{to|Thryduulf}} Thank You, that's very handy and helpful! Guess it was a bit tricky when it comes to page moves that create a handful of double redirects automatically. I was hoping to see this in preview, but you actually have to click "Publish changes" to see the error message. It's similar to the user-set "forgot to type in an edit summary" screen, that is, it stops you in your tracks and shows you your error, but if you click "Publish changes" again, the double redirect will be created anyway. Very helpful, thanks again! P.I. Ellsworth , ed. ^{put'er there} 09:48, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

::All I'm responsible for is spotting the entry in Tech News and thinking people here would find it useful to know about. The developers are the ones who should be thanked. Thryduulf (talk) 11:22, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

:::I've grown to expect such a great response from you. You were the conduit by which I learned of this awesome, needed change. That is what I thanked you for; don' sell yursef short, Thryduulf, conduits are important, too! And yes, I have also thanked those pitiful (read that "awesome") devs, as noted in the Phabulous link you left above. 'Tsall good! P.I. Ellsworth , ed. ^{put'er there} 21:34, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

I have been involved in at least two WP:RMs, where it was proposed that since a specific person is the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC of a specific alternate spelling of a given name, that person should occupy the "real estate" of alternate spelling and not be redirected to the most common name spelling of the given name. I argued that all alternate spellings should redirect to the article about the given name (as per WP:POFR, which has no exceptions), perhaps WP:IAR in the case if that person using the alternate spelling is the primary topic of all alternate spellings of that given name (which maybe very, very rare). At any rate, for "Jhoanna", an alternate of spelling of "Joanna", this is now been moved to an article about a specific person (see Talk:Jhoanna#Requested move 16 January 2025. Another, "Mikha", an alternate spelling of "Micah", is currently being discussed at Talk:Bini (group)#Requested move 29 January 2025. Both Jhoanna and Mikha being discussed are members of Bini (group).

What's the actual policy or interpretation on this? Howard the Duck (talk) 20:50, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

:If one individual is the most notable (or only) holder of a particular name, they are a likely candidate for being the primary topic. This is especially true for unusual spellings. Jhoanna is not even so much as mentioned at Joanna so there's currently no reason at all to redirect to there. While Mikha is mentioned as a Hebrew spelling of the name at Micah, the page does not list any individuals with that name. Whether Mikha (singer) is the primary topic over Mikha Tambayong or any other individuals with the name can be discussed. WP:POFR does not in any way prohibit such primary topic redirects (or moving a mononymous performer to the base name). A case could also be made to redirect Mikha to Michael (given name) as a hypocorism. older ≠ wiser 21:10, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

::{{tpq|If one individual is the most notable (or only) holder of a particular name, they are a likely candidate for being the primary topic.}} I agree with this, and extend that to if a person is the most notable (or only) person who spells their name a given way, then they are likely to be the primary topic for that spelling. Hatnotes can and should be used to direct people to articles about people with similar names in the same way that Carole White and Carol White do. Thryduulf (talk) 22:23, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

:: The names Micah ({{langx|he|מִיכָה|translit=Mikhah}}) and Michael ({{langx|he|מִיכָאֵל|translit=Mikha'El}}) are related but distinct. Someone searching for for Mikha is almost certainly searching for Micah, not Michael. Absent a person spelling his name that way or a DAB page, it should redirect to Micah with a {{tl|distinguish}} hatnote. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 15:00, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

:::There are a number of persons named Mikhail for whom 'Mikha' is used as a hypocorism. I only mentioned Michael (given name) because Mikahil redirects there. older ≠ wiser 17:07, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

:William Shakspere was well known for spelling his own name in about a dozen different ways. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:52, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

:The guidance that applies is WP:SMALLDETAILS - {{tq|The general approach is that whatever readers might type in the search box, they are guided as swiftly as possible to the topic they might reasonably be expected to be looking for}}. So the real question is if the average reader would be more likely to recognize and use such a term as a reference to a specific topic, or as a variant of a common name. --Joy (talk) 13:16, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

:So apparently my interpretation of {{quote|Alternative spellings or punctuation. For example, Colour redirects to Color, and Al-Jazeera redirects to Al Jazeera.}}

:where "Jhoanna" should redirect to "Joanna" is not what most people in this discussion agree to, except for Jewish names I suppose. If the interpretation of most people here is the correct one, I propose that the specific bullet point should be amended. Howard the Duck (talk) 00:33, 14 February 2025 (UTC)

Should I add the trick where you can append ?redirect=no to the end of the URL and ignore the redirect? Justjourney (talk) 03:55, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

The Help:Redirect page bears many similarities to this one. I am aware that the help namespace is supposed to be a tutorial, but for a tutorial, the help page and this one aren't exactly all that different. That begs the question, if the 2 pages are similar, why separate them? Case in point, the Help:Merging page is simply a disambiguation to the Wikipedia one. Senomo Drines (talk) 17:14, 12 March 2025 (UTC)

• Help:Redirect and Wikipedia:How to make a redirect have a lot of overlap and could be merged without a lot of impact as far as can tell. But I strongly disagree with merging the how-to material with Wikipedia:Redirect. This page has WAY too much obscure details that would be overwhelming for someone looking for simple how-to instructions. older ≠ wiser 18:30, 12 March 2025 (UTC)
• Just been waiting a few years for someone to do it Wikipedia talk:How to make a redirect#Merge into Help:Redirect? Moxy🍁 00:31, 13 March 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose merging Help:Redirect into this page. They cover distinct material: this page is mainly a guideline regarding redirects, the help page tells more about the technical way they work and how to use/make them. Mr. Starfleet Command (talk) 00:14, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose per Bkonrad's statement, I think the tutorial page should remain separate, as it's intended to be a resource for users unfamiliar with the system to learn how to create a redirect. Stickymatch 21:21, 21 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose per above arguments, and particularly by older ≠ wiser. The current status is quite clear and succinct. There is no confusion. -The Gnome (talk) 04:52, 3 June 2025 (UTC)

Hello! Me and fellow users on hrwiki have been working on porting this guideline to Croatian Wikipedia, but we aren't able to think of an example for reason #1 in the pro-deletion subsection ("unreasonably difficult to locate similarly named articles"). I haven't been able to replicate the issue in the example given as searching only covers the mainspace by default, while I suppose "New Articles" is in reference to Special:NewPages. Same goes for hrwiki. Since we're considering dropping this particular reason for deletion, I wanted to check if anybody could make sense of this before we do so. Thanks! ☀ Hijérovīt | ^þⰁ_č 22:09, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

:See Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 May 3#Tawnia as an example. It redirected to Neopets where Tawnia is not mentioned. Wikipedia also has an article Tawnia McKiernan and a redirect for a fictional character Tawnia Baker. Now, a particular WP:PTOPIC does not exist here, and a disambiguation page for just two entries, one of them redirect, is overkill. So, the redirect was deleted, so anyone searching for "Tawnia" will find every article with the word in it. Another case is when there are two articles with similar names, and there is a typo that can refer to either of the two articles, in such case the typo-redirect will be deleted so that search function can show both options to the reader. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 01:34, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

thumb Moral education redirects to Character education, not Religious education to which it, falsely(!), redirected to only up to 9 May 2013. Nevertheless, DuckDuckGo shows the latter at the top when searching for the 1:1 exactly the same search term, as shown in the screenshot on the right.

Even worse, the Character education article is not included in at least the first 2 pages of results.
By the way, I think this should be a redirect with possibilities as Moral education if anything is just one aspect of Character education.

This may also affect more articles and maybe it's not even a relatively rare exception but a quite frequent occurrence. One can't report it at phabricator as it doesn't seem to be an issue of Wikipedia. I thought one use of redirects is that they make articles discoverable to people searching the Web for either synonyms (or very related overlapping terms) or for subtopics of Wikipedia articles (usually linked to article sections). What could be done on the Wikimedia side of things is investigating what the cause of this could be (and if possible fix it eg by changing how things are being crawled/indexed), possibly reaching out, possibly finding ways to identify more such cases, and exploring how big the problem is. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:15, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

:Fair point, but there's only so much we can do about how external sources use Wikipedia, so I wouldn't consider this a bug. If crawlers wanted to distinguish between redirects and full articles, they could already do so based on the wikitext. It's still something to be aware of in RfDs, though. --BDD (talk) 20:37, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

::Yes, that's why I'm asking about it here instead of filing a code issue. For example, I wonder if there are more cases like it and if so if there are any estimates how many redirects this affects or how much it impedes people in finding the most relevant Wikipedia article.
Another thing that isn't the post above: "moral education" is mentioned 16 times in the Character education article and I don't know why DDG shows that other page at the top. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:37, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

:There also is a box on the right side of "Assist" that is "Auto-generated based on listed sources" and includes a definition and a link to the Wikipedia article. Too bad I didn't take a screenshot of the full page earlier – I don't know if that's been there before or not (I don't remember it being there; and I think I probably would have included it in the screenshot; maybe DDG is currently changing some search engine things).

:However, it would only make the issue less problematic, not solve it, since the top search results is still very visible and many/most users likely rather read that and/or click that Wikipedia link, instead of reading the possibly auto-generated text in that new box on the right and clicking the much smaller Wikipedia link there. And even if they do, it's still problematic if there is such a large top search result when the redirect of the search term points to another article. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:51, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

::Just noticed one has to click on "Assist" for the box to appear and when it's visible, that link is blue so it wasn't shown earlier and the default seems to be for the box to not be visible. I think some systematic investigations – with some terms that are redirects on Wikipedia to see whether Wikipedia links in the search results match what those pages redirect to – could be a good idea or if anybody else notices the same thing it would be good if they could comment here with the case so over time we could find out why pages that aren't matching the redirect are shown in the results. Maybe an issue is that those are less-watched and less reliable but there still are many mentions of the term in the article of this example, implying the redirect is very plausible. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:58, 6 June 2025 (UTC)